Gov. Rod Blagojevich and Northern Illinois University officials announced plans Wednesday to bulldoze Cole Hall and build a $40 million upgrade somewhere on campus — a move immediately criticized by some students and a local legislator.

Sadie Gurman

Gov. Rod Blagojevich and Northern Illinois University officials announced plans Wednesday to bulldoze Cole Hall and build a $40 million upgrade somewhere on campus — a move immediately criticized by some students and a local legislator.

“They could create a memorial on campus without demolishing the building,” said NIU senior David Dombrowski. “The memorial is the building itself.”

Wednesday’s announcement came as a surprise to many students, who said they had no idea administrators wanted to raze the lecture hall where five students were killed in a shooting rampage Feb. 14.

Asked repeatedly about the fate of the building in the week after the shootings, university leaders consistently said they were weighing their options. On Wednesday, however, NIU President John Peters said administrators had considered tearing down Cole Hall even before the slayings because the building “lacks modern features” and “can’t be used for anything else.”

During an afternoon news conference, Blagojevich, Peters, state Sen. Brad Burzynski and state Rep. Robert Pritchard said the building had to go.

“Cole Hall will be torn down, but what happened there will never be forgotten,” Blagojevich said, less than two weeks after gunman Steven Kazmierczak opened fire in the building, killing five students before killing himself on the stage.

Blagojevich said he will ask lawmakers to approve $40 million in state money to build a new classroom building called Memorial Hall, which would be centrally located but not in Cole Hall’s footprint. Burzynski and Pritchard, sponsors of the funding bill, said they are “cautiously optimistic” that lawmakers will sign off.

But state Sen. Dave Syverson, R-Rockford, said tearing down a functional building would be an irresponsible use of state money given the state’s other pressing needs.

“To spend $40 million at a time when tuition is rising faster than ever before, at a time when the state’s other pressing infrastructure needs aren’t being addressed, clearly is not the right thing to do,” Syverson said. “We have to sometimes step out of these emotional issues and look at what is the right thing to do.”

Under Blagojevich’s plan, the state would sell bonds to borrow the $40 million. It remained unclear Wednesday night how the state would repay the loan, but Burzynski said the dollars likely would come from the state’s general fund — its central account for operating expenses.

Molly Winel, a junior, agreed with the governor that Cole Hall should go.

“It’d be too hard to go back in there,” she said.

Demolition of Cole Hall could happen this spring if state funding goes through, Peters said. Officials want to erect a tribute to the five students on the site of Cole Hall, possibly in the form of green space or a statue.

Planning the new building could take about nine months, he said, with bids to go out between January and March. Groundbreaking on Memorial Hall could happen as soon as spring 2009, with occupancy as early as December 2010 — if all goes according to plan.

Memorial Hall would be bigger than Cole, with three auditoriums for 250 students each.

Cole Hall, where nearly every undergraduate has at least one class, was built in 1968, Peters said, to accommodate soaring enrollment. The hall has two auditoriums seating what students estimate to be 250 each.

“It’s part of NIU, it’s part of NIU’s experience,” said junior Christine Mahalas, adding that while returning to class there would be too painful, she doesn’t want to see the building razed. She and junior Elizabeth Granger said they liked the idea of the building being used as something else. They said the campus “would just look weird” without Cole. “It’s still part of our campus.”

Register Star reporter Aaron Chambers contributed to this report.
Sadie Gurman can be reached at 815-987-1389 or at sgurman@rrstar.com.

What Virginia Tech, Columbine did

Virginia Tech: The buildings at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University that were the scene of the deadliest school shooting in U.S. history are still in use.

Seung-Hui Cho killed 32 people and wounded many more before committing suicide on the grounds of Virginia Tech April 15, 2007.

Cho shot his first victims in a dorm room. The room is still closed, but the 800-room residence hall remains open. Two hours later, Cho opened fire in Norris Hall, which contains the school’s engineering science and mechanics program.

Norris Hall reopened two months later. The university announced in December a $1 million remodeling of part of the second floor, which will be home to the new Center for Peace Studies and Violence Prevention.

Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo.: Two students killed 12 other student and one teacher in April 1999. The library where most of the killings took place, above the cafeteria/commons area, no longer exists.

The library was torn out and the commons made into a two-story space. A new library was built and connected to the school by a hallway. A separate memorial was built at a nearby park.

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